Send a Text Message to SFMOMA, and They’ll Send Works of Art to Your Mobile Phone

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art–otherwise simply known as SFMOMA–has 34,678 artworks in its collections, only 5% of which it can put on display at any given time. That creates an accessibility problem. So the museum asked itself: “How can we provide a more comprehensive experience of our collection?” And they developed Send Me SFMOMA in response.

Send Me SFMOMA is “an SMS service that provides an approachable, personal, and creative method of sharing the breadth of SFMOMA’s collection with the public.” Here’s how it works:

Text 572-51 with the words “send me” followed by a keyword, a color, or even an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text message. For example “send me the ocean” might get you Pirkle Jones’ Breaking Wave, Golden Gate; “send me something blue” could result in Éponge (SE180) by Yves Klein; and “send me 💐” might return Yasumasa Morimura’s An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Collar of Thorns). Each text message triggers a query to the SFMOMA collection API, which then responds with an artwork matching your request.

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